Mark O’Collin Gets Corporate Advertising Gig

For more than 30 years, the Dilbert comic strip has appeared in newspapers across the country, poking fun at the drudgery of office life and micromanagement, topics familiar to millions of working Americans.

While the audience and punchlines are a bit more niche, there’s now a cartoon out there specifically for financial advisors, especially those who are working in or have spent time at a wirehouse.

Eric Diton, one of the founders of The Wealth Alliance, an independent RIA with offices on Long Island and in Florida, had familiarity with cartoons through his uncle, who was a comic book artist. Diton and his partner, Rob Conzo, both of whom left a wirehouse to form their firm in 2019, thought a strip would be a novel way to depict the joys of wirehouse advisor life and engage potential advisors who might want to join the firm.

Financial Planning tells of a unique recruitment campaign.

The article never identifies Mr. Diton’s comic book artist uncle, neither does it identify the cartoonist of the company’s comic strip. We can’t help with the former (Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who of American Comic Books lists no “Diton”) *see add below*, but the comic strip is drawn by Mark O’Collin.

Who you may know better as Dan Collins, famed creator of Looks Good on Paper
and other comic strips and cartoons.

So congratulations to Dan, and nice work.
The story says that more strips are in the planning stages.

© The Wealth Alliance

* This later article about The Wealth Alliance comic strip notes about Diton’s uncle:

Diton, president and managing director, was all for the comics, having had an uncle who was noted for his creation of the character “Margie” for Timely Comics, the 1940s predecessor of Marvel Comics. He also was the final cartoonist on the comic strip “Mickey Finn.”

That paraphrases the Wikipedia entry introduction to Morris Weiss.